Thursday, June 12, 2014

I know the current hotness for myself is mostly in the saga camp, but occasionally I love to dabble in the idea of black powder era. In the past twelve months our gaming group has jumped into the other studio tomahawk game 'Muskets and tomahawks' and found its short, simple and story driven games to be a breath of fresh air that leaves me reading about and collecting more and more miniatures from the 18th century.

This leads me to picking up a new kit that I have been oddly anticipating for a few months. The kit in question looked to be a great way for players to accrue a small starter force for musket tomahawks so I was more than happy to dive in and grab some british infantry to fight a good mates Americans.

The contents
So whats in the box? The contents like many plastic kits these days are an array of several diffrent bodies and plenty of arms with weapons enough to create the many diffrent common poses of line infantry. There is also plenty of diffrent types of heads and arms to create and represent line, light and grenadier infantry. At first glance of the sprues instructions the kit may seem restricted in poses, however with a little patience and kit bashing skills many more poses are possible to create. In addition to infantry there are several command figures that cover all bases including 2 officers, a drummer, two colour sargeants and a regular sargeant. Overal I found the contents of the box to be impressively flexible and without a doubt there has been alot of thought put in to maxamise the users options.

The sculpts / quality of miniature
Anyone out there who has been following the wargames factory story would know the variable quality and number of faults past plastic kits have contained. Ranging from lack of detail, odd poses and utter frustration in reading sprues during assembly, wargames factory has had its fair shair of hits and big misses. The good news here is that all of these issues are not present at all in this kit. The detail and sculpting is crisp, professional and represents the company's evolution in CAD skills. The poses are realistic, subtle and reminiscent of ranked line infantry of the period. And finally the contents of the box come with easy to read instructions that practically hold your hand as you construct each figure. It is important to note the scale and makup of these miniatures fit into more 'true' scale proportions and mixing with other company's infantry might look a little odd, fortunatley this choice in anatomic proportions suits this era quite well.

Group shots and quick painted examples

Line infantry and officer

Light infantry

Painted and primed

Final verdict/ thoughts
There was two reasons why I felt compelled to review these miniatures on here. Firstly the outstanding leap forward in quality and a accessibility of this kit has succsessfully drawn my attention to future wargames factory products. If they continue along this range of miniatures with this quality they will have a set of 18th century figures that rival heavy weights like the perry's and north star. Secondly I wanted to bring attention of these to any gamers out there who want to ease their way into black powder era gaming without breaking the budget. Musket and tomahawks is a fantastic game that will have you retelling many crazy exploits of heroic or moronic proportions and this kit allows you to build a british force of around 200-300 points (the basic level) very easily.

I am honestly excited for the rest of this range as I feel it is an untapped era for multi part plastic kits and I cannot wait to get a hold of the rest of the range. Well done wargames factory! *golf clap*

For those interested the kit retails at around 28 ish dollars (AUD) and contains all the parts to create the following british units in muskets and tomahawks:
- british officer
-british line infantry
-british light infantry
-british grenadiers
-Rangers